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Topic: Rest (06/14/04)
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TITLE: The Rest of the Week By Michael Antonovich 06/21/04 |
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It all started rather abruptly just weeks before Spring Break. A major project at work would soon start, one that would prohibit us from taking a vacation during the summer. So when my supervisor said, if you want to take a vacation anytime before fall, you better do it now.
When I told my wife, she started jumping up and down saying, ‘I know just where we can go. We can go on that cruise I always wanted to go on.’ I didn’t think she would be able to get the tickets, so I said, ‘Sure I’ll go if you can make the arrangements.’ The next day she called me at work to say that everything was set. Maybe everything was set from her point of view, but I started to worry about how I could pack my laptop, my pocket PC, and would cell phones even work out at sea?
As the day approached, I carefully packed my electronics into a separate carry-on. We rose early in the morning and drove to the port. As we got out of the car and started to unload the luggage, I realized that I had forgotten one piece. Yes, that one piece was the bag with my laptop.
I suddenly felt ‘naked’ without my laptop. But it was too late to go back home to get it and then drive back to the port. So I asked the person checking us in if they had an Internet Café on board ship. To my surprise, she said they did at which time my wife gave me one of her looks that meant that I was dead if I spent all of my time in there.
But somehow I never got to that Internet Café. I spent the rest of the afternoon exploring the ship with my wife. To someone who had never been on a cruise before, it was like a floating city. They seemed to have everything. We soon became involved in many of the shipboard activities and met many new friends. The other guests at our dinner table were wonderful and we often arrived before anyone else and our table was one of the last tables to leave. We explored several Caribbean islands, both above and below the water. The colors seemed so vibrant. The reds, yellows, and oranges of the fish amazed me. Even while watching the ship’s wake, I thought that I had never seen water quite that shade of blue before.
But all too soon, the week was over. We had been very busy, yet at the same time I felt completely rested. It was then that I realized that I never did make it the Internet Café. As I walked down the gang plank to exit the ship that had been my home for the last week, I sadly said goodbye to the friends I had met. It seemed like I had known them forever, not just seven days. Mixed with the sadness of leaving was a pool of new energy that I suddenly realized had been growing all week. I could not wait to get back to work the next day and start in on that new project.
It is easy to get so tied up in the work of this world that one can lose sight of the fact that we work in order to live, not live in order to work. I understood now the need to take time out from my normal activities to rest. But rest does not mean physical rest. Rather it could mean spending time with my family doing something fun. Or perhaps it might mean going for a walk at the park, the country or along the beach. It could even mean simply closing my eyes while thanking God for the past week and asking for his guidance in the coming week. No matter the form, rest has now become as important to me as the work I perform the rest of the week.